How to resolve corrupt or stuck invoices was raised at our Melb User Group Meeting in May 2014.There are two tests in Manager you can perform to check whether invoices are stuck.

a. In Manager > Invoices, type 'a' in the top box of the status column. This will reveal all invoices with the approved status that have not moved through to your ERP system. Have any been sitting with the approved status for too long? If so, invoices are stuck between Transfer and your ERP.

b. In Manager > Invoices, sort the Interpreted column in most recent date order. A blank date and time field means that the invoice is waiting to be interpreted. Have any been sitting there with a blank value for too long? If so, Invoices are stuck between your Scan module and Invoices Module.

What to do?

Invoices stuck between Transfer and ERP

1. Ask your users to temporarily exit the Invoices module while you fix the problem. If at any point you get a "locked" system message after everyone is out, go to Manager > Administration > Unlock database. It is best to unlock only Invoices connected to a single invoice profile, than unlock everything. Try the most conservative first before unlocking everything.2. Login to your server(s) and stop the Transfer service. 3. Start Transfer module4. Select job (ours is called SCAN)5. Click Edit6. Go to Transfer > Sort7. Change the Sort order (from ascending to descending, or vice versa)8. Click OK9. Click Start (Alt+S)10. You should see the number of invoices processed. Monitor to ensure job is going through. The job will stop when it finds the corrupt invoice11. Go to Manager and delete the corrupt invoice (if it can't be deleted, ie system crashes) then see new thread on how to get rid of a corrupt invoice)12. Repeat steps 9-11 until all invoices processed.13. Remember to right-click and select Refresh in Manager > Invoices when you check whether all invoices with a status of 'a' are now processed. 14. Restart the Transfer Service15. Exit the Transfer module

A note about business continuityOnce the Interpret or Transfer job starts to run manually, AP can continue to process invoices; however, if you are running Transfer manually, it is advisable that they do not 'Complete' any Invoices/Documents in Verify otherwise your list of stuck invoices is going to grow and you will be monitoring it for longer. Conversely, if you are running Interpret manually, it is advisable that AP stop scanning or processing emailed images until you have processed all of the stuck invoices; however they can continue to use Verify to push invoices through to your ERP system.

Also, the stuck invoices do not impact any work in the Invoice Cockpit/Process Director within the ERP system itself, so AP can continue processing within the ERP while the invoices are moving through either Transfer or Interpret.

We had a very similar issue and through months of investigation it was understood to be a conflict caused by the interpret module, where the file name generator was generating exactly the same name for two seperate files. This then caused invoices to remain as an "Approved" status, as when the transfer section was writing the files to our system folder it failed due to there already being a file with the same file name already existing.

We were advised to upgraded to the 5-5 SP7, which we did.

There was also some advice that our readsoft services should be re-configured/re-ordered. We were advised to alter the "Pause after job" service setting to 60 seconds and to have our services running in exactly the order below:

Hi Scott,Welcome to the forum and for sharing your insights. Your suggestion sounds promising, especically when our services stopped yesterday and I can't find the root cause! I am trying to check where the Pause after Job Settings are changed. I can't see this parameter in Invoices 5-7 but maybe this is due to the version. Can you confirm module and menu path.__________________CherylLinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/cherylc-651471a0

If you want to follow up on Scott's suggestion, a quick way of checking if your system is issuing duplicate image names:

1. Go to Manager > Process Log2. Click anywhere in the log, click Ctrl+A to select all3. Click Ctrl+C to copy4. Open Excel and Ctrl+V to paste your log (note this works in Optimize too so great for analysis stats)5. To check the Image file name: - sort by column "Image file" - insert a new column next to the Image file column (ours was in column K) - add a formula in the second data row =if(K3=K2,"same","diff"). - copy formula to last row - filter column L for same

This will check for duplicates during the duration of your process log only. It is possible duplicates are issued over a longer period of time. I think the only way to pick these up would be to run a Search on the image name of an Approved invoice that is stuck, in your Transferred Images folder.Note, we are on Invoices 5-7 and the Process Log quick test revealed there were 14 images with the same image name (out of 8000+). This occured on one day only shortly after go-live of the upgrade, so maybe a hangover of our go-live issues. The invoices did transfer to the ERP okay so I am wondering how the system resolved the duplicate file names in the Transferred Images folder. Something I will follow up. Thanks for the tip Scott!__________________CherylLinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/cherylc-651471a0

Today I had an interesting support call from one of our AP Processors which I thought would be useful to share in this thread. The problem was the invoices had not been transferred to Verify for about 15 minutes. The question was "has interpret stopped working....again?". The invoices were coming from Collector 6-3 and we on Invoices 5-7. First I checked the email folder and I could see an email which was 3.1mb. The email contained 5 pdf invoices ranging in size from 2 to 50 pages. In total there were 120 pages to interpret. My dilemma was I would need to stop the Interpret service to send the job manually and I could simply be stopping the job as it was processing.

Bluescope Steel had previously mentioned to me that they thought it was taking longer for 5-7 to convert PDFs to TIFFs. I checked Manager for stuck invoices (ie Interpret date and time is blank) and the Event Viewer. Nothing stood out that the service had stopped. I could of also checked Task Manager to see if eittrp was using CPU but was confident this was a timing issue. I asked AP to wait another 15 minutes. Eventually all 5 invoices came through. In total, it took about 25 minutes to process all of them. Individually, it took 10 minutes for the 50 pg inv, 5 minutes per 20 pgs and 2 min for 2 pgs. The time was more closely aligned with the number of pages than the size of the PDF. The 50 pg inv was 800 kb while the 2 pg inv was 400 kb.

It was the first email processed that morning so there were another 20 emails following it with an avg size of 150 kb each. It usually takes about 20-30 seconds to process one single page emailed invoice. In a nutshell, the large job had held up the invoices moving through.

I suggested to AP that if they get multiple invoices with a large attachment size to drag them into the email folder LAST. The AP processor went one step further and called the vendor to request that since their invoices were up to 50 pages, they were too complex to include multiple in the one email and to send separate emails for each PDF. Aaahh, isn't it great when AP & IT work well together to find a solution!

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